United States

We investigated a new approach to physics curriculum focusing on student growth using interleaved practice. While the current physics curriculum focuses on the mastery of a single topic in a short time, we reorganized our curriculum to interleave several topics starting with basic conceptual questions and gradually increase the difficulty of problems students face throughout the semester. With early feedback from students taking a second-semester calculus-based physics class, we can show that the restructuring of the course has led students to become more confident in their problem-solving abilities and are more capable of long-term retention of material.

AAPT SM 22

Reorganization of Physics Curriculum with a Focus on Student Growth

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poster

Like many other physics departments in recent years, we have worked to integrate computational activities into our physics curriculum. Our integration has focused on second-year physics courses, where we have adopted a centralized approach: The computational strand is interwoven through multiple courses and is administered independently of the course instructors. Our goal has been to provide regular, cohesive exposure of computation, contextualized to their courses, without overburdening any one course/instructor. We will present the structure of the computation exercises and their evolution, the coding assessment & feedback tool that we have developed, as well as student growth and reflections over the past four years.

A Multi-Course Integration of Computation into Our Physics Curriculum

Three-Dimensional Learning (3DL) is a framework that provides tools to help highlight what we want our students to be able to do with their knowledge. This framework creates opportunities for students to learn physics in sways authentic to the practice of science by aligning course content along 3 Dimensions: Scientific Practices that encompass what scientists do to explore phenomena, Core Ideas that underpin our discipline's central concepts, and Crosscutting Concepts that provide the lenses for how we view phenomena. Research into 3DL has shown that implementing the framework provides substantial benefits to student learning, but does take effort. With this poster, I will discuss how to use the 3 Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol as a tool for creating 3DL-aligned assessment items. I will share strategies to transforming existing problems and how to create 3D items from scratch, and where our data best suggests effort is most efficiently put.

Using 3 Dimensional Learning to Improve Student Learning on Assessments

How might we use breaks in physics classes to provide a meaningful experience, heighten cooperation and concentration, and provide more safety for kids on the way to school? We developed a Tactile Reaction Training that we call TReaT and can be embedded in physics classes without compromises to lab safety. The training is about ten minutes for each of them and focused on getting a better body feeling to react more appropriately in danger situations. Aspects of Germany‘s core curriculum in Physics, e.g. conservation of Momentum, Force and Motion is connected to the training. We tested the approach with 38 students of fifth and sixth grade over six weeks. For evaluation, we arrayed 10 students in a line across a marked lined that should resemble a train or bus stop. The kids who participated in TRT were significantly more often able to withstand the push and kept a safe stand.

Applying the Tactile Reaction Training TReaT in a Physics Classroom

Most introductory physics textbooks combine theory, applications, problem-solving, and history in a single volume, resulting in a hefty (and often expensive) tome. The result is often tedious for students to read, and it can be difficult for students to know which portions of the reading they are responsible for and to what extent; and if students do not read the textbook, it is difficult to devote class time to problem-solving and groupwork. I am writing a free, online textbook which focuses strictly on the theory and equations underlying introductory physics, with a focus on readability. The book is shorter than usual, with each page devoted to a specific topic to allow reading in short blocks, and students have reported preferring it over the standard physics textbook. It will be available for beta testing this fall for those who might be interested in using it for their own classes.

A Streamlined Approach to the Introductory Physics Textbook

Most introductory algebra-based physics courses focus entirely on simple situations for which neat analytical solutions exist: constant acceleration, freefall, simple harmonic motion. One of the main reasons for this is that most of our students lack the mathematical tools to investigate these complicated situations which more closely match those they would find in the real world. However, the use of spreadsheets and coding languages enables a different but powerful approach to situations whose analytical solutions are too difficult for algebra-based students to deal with. When using differential models, students can observe complex behavior emerge from simple, easily-understood rules. Here we demonstrate a number of situations from mechanics and circuits which highlight the advantage of differential models in making complex phenomena accessible to students with little background in math such as motion with non-uniform acceleration, air resistance and terminal velocity, simple and damped harmonic motion, non-Ohmic resistance, and RC circuits.

Utility of Differential Models in Algebra-Based Physics

Complex multiple-choice questions are commonly used to test for physics knowledge, appearing on course exams, concept inventories, and the physics GRE. These questions are assumed to measure more complex thinking than standard multiple choice questions do because students must determine which set of statements is true (e.g., A only, A and C, etc.). Our previous work found students in STEM courses answer these questions incorrectly more often than standard multiple-choice questions. Here, we examine whether there are disparities in who answers these questions correctly in introductory physics compared to other introductory STEM courses. Our data comes from an online, “points-free” test bank where students practice for their upcoming exams using actual questions from previous exams. As expected, results showed significant variation between students in who answers complex multiple-choice questions correctly, which can inform whether using these types of questions might be introducing unintended systematic grade penalties in course exams.

Who answers complex multiple-choice questions in physics correctly?

Results from a multi-semester study of the effects of eight supplemental laboratory activities in a general education physics will be presented. A total of two control and three treatment semesters were studied. The results allowed comparison between expert-like attitudes measured by the CLASS and scientific reasoning skills measured by the Lawson CTSR. Comparison of the pre/posttest CLASS scores and posttest Lawson CTSR scores found no correlation between the overall scores or the scores from the question groups measuring specific attitudes or reasoning skills. Additionally, both student attitudes and scientific reasoning skills showed improvement for the first semester the intervention was applied. In subsequent semesters, improved scientific reasoning skills continued to be observed while improvement in students’ scientific attitude faded. A detailed comparison of the CLASS and CTSR scores will be presented along with a discussion of the implications for instruction given this apparent decoupling of expert-like attitudes and reasoning skills.

Comparison of expert-like attitudes and scientific reasoning skills

In this poster we examine what constitutes high, normal and low self-efficacy - or the confidence in one’s capability to perform a task - for one student. We draw from a study where we used a novel mixed methods design to examine how a student’s self-efficacy fluctuates over time. Quantitatively, we employed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) using surveys of domain-specific self-efficacy. Qualitatively, we used daily journal reflections to investigate threats and supports toward students’ self-efficacy. In order to identify high, normal, and low moments of self-efficacy we have explored their individual interquartile range. Here, we will present our mixed-methods analysis to examine how disaggregating by time influences the process of identifying how, normal, and low self-efficacy.

Investigating Measures of Self-Efficacy Disaggregated by Time

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts at the level of introductory physics used to help inform instructors of student mastery of those concepts. Prior studies suggest that many concepts on the survey are challenging for introductory physics students and the average student scores after traditional instruction are low. The research presented here compares the performance of students in introductory, upper-level, and graduate-level physics courses on five CSEM questions to understand the cross-sectional evolution of student understanding of these concepts from the introductory to upper-level to graduate-level. We discuss five CSEM questions that remain challenging for many upper-level and graduate students.

Evolution in student conceptual understanding of electricity and magnetism

Societal stereotypes and biases pertaining to who belongs in physics and who can excel in physics can impact motivational beliefs, e.g., of women and racial and ethnic minority students in physics courses. This study investigates how the learning environment predicts male and female students’ motivational beliefs including physics self-efficacy, interest, and identity at the end of year long (spanning two-semester) algebra-based introductory physics courses. These were courses at a large university in the US taken primarily by biological science majors many of whom are interested in health professions. Although women are not underrepresented in these physics courses, societal stereotypes and biases internalized by female students over their lifetime can still impact their motivational beliefs about physics. Our findings show gender gap in motivational beliefs favoring men. These findings can be useful to provide support and create an equitable and inclusive learning environment to help all students excel in these courses.

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Reorganization of Physics Curriculum with a Focus on Student Growth

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